


Unsteady

by amaradangeli



Series: Stains of Jolinar [1]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Episode: s02e02 In the Line of Duty, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 16:36:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13955637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amaradangeli/pseuds/amaradangeli
Summary: The things she now had the memories of living through made it impossible to feel human.





	Unsteady

**Author's Note:**

> This story is courtesy of a [twitter/song prompt](https://twitter.com/XFchemist/status/972810681874608131) from the incredibly talented [xfchemist](http://xfchemist.tumblr.com/). The song is [Unsteady by X Ambassadors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pcbxZ2Oe3I). 
> 
> The art is unsurprisingly by the endlessly talented [SCIMM](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Samantha_Carter_is_my_muse/pseuds/Samantha_Carter_is_my_muse).
> 
> Upon conversation we decided to give a new series a go. This one is finite so don't worry. It's not going to be the open-ended slowness of the [In Washington](https://archiveofourown.org/series/563059) Series. This one will have six stories: Red, Orange (this one), Yellow, Green, Blue and Purple. The other stories are not yet complete. And I don't know how long it's going to take. The idea is that they will each stand alone but will also build on one another. So, in theory, you could read only the ones with summaries that appealed. But, naturally, I'd love it if you read them all. 

It had been ten days since Jolinar’s death and the relinquishment of Sam’s body. And still, it was like a fight for her own mind, all the time.

She hadn’t seen another person since she left the base. That, too, made her feel a little less than human. She was the one they didn’t know how to deal with because she wasn’t exactly a _person_ anymore, was she? This…thing… she’d become was an amalgamation, and abomination, and while she waited to find out if she’d ever be able to _think_ again she also waited to find out if she still had a career.

Sam slept a lot. Then she couldn’t tell if it was dream or reality causing the images that took over her mind. It had been days – more than a week – since she’d seen the outside of her house. The medical leave would be running out soon. And then what?

The things she now had the memories of living through made it impossible to feel human. But the way the memories made her feel made it abundantly clear that she wasn’t Tok’ra.

Her kitchen was a wasteland of half-empty coffee cups and lowball classes with the sticky residue of whisky clinging to the insides. Her living room was dark and too cold and she cocooned herself in layers of sweats and shivered because turn the heat on felt too much like cheating. She stared at the walls because the bookcases were too much reminder of who she used to be.

A couple times a day she’d fill her tub with lukewarm water and let her head rest with her ears just under the waterline. The sounds of her breathing would fill her head and push out all the images she didn’t want to be seeing.

She’d lay in her bed, damp between the sheets, hair cool against her skin and stare at the popcorn ceiling until Jolinar’s memories rushed in full force. Pain, torture, loneliness, they were all there. But never as bad as the moments when she felt a deep and abiding love and the pleasure of worship Sam just knew belonged to someone else, because she’d never, not once, been able to conjure those feelings on her own.

Through the pulled curtains she couldn’t tell if it was day or night.

~*~

He stood on the front porch, keys in hand. She hadn’t answered the phone in more than a week. It had taken him forty-five minutes to convince Daniel that she didn’t need the team descending on her. But he couldn’t not go.

Her car was in the driveway, but he’d been knocking for five minutes. Against his better judgement, he let himself in.

Her house bordered on cold and was dark, despite the early evening hour. He looked for her first in the kitchen. His stomach dropped when he saw the collection of cups and glasses and empty bottles of whiskey he knew she never touched under normal circumstances.

Down her dark hallway he made his way by feel. At her bedroom door he stopped. He could make her out, the sheets draped over her body, her face turned away from him. In the light that filtered through the window he could see an uncharacteristic curl in her hair and one pale, slim shoulder and arm anchoring the sheet down against her obviously naked body.

The feelings finding her like that elicited in him were anything but pleasant.

He made his way around the bed, stepping over discarded sweatshirts and pants in quantities that told him that’s likely all she’d been wearing – when she’d been wearing anything at all.

He was surprised to find her blue eyes open when he rounded the bed. She looked through him in a way she never had, and it chilled him in a way her house hadn’t. This close, he noticed the goosebumps on her skin.

“Carter?”

Her eyes didn’t so much as twitch.

He sat down on the edge of the bed. It made her body tilt toward him. He touched her and she flinched. He wondered if it was pain or something else.

“You okay?” He cringed as he said it. She was obviously not okay. “What can I do?” Damn it. He hadn’t used that voice since he’d asked Sara what he could do after Charlie. He wasn’t that man anymore. And he wasn’t that man to this woman.

She broke anyway. Sobs wracked her body. She turned her face first into the pillow and then – once he’d pushed himself closer to her and pulled her into his chest – into the warmth of his neck. Her skin was cool under his hands and the sheets damp where they gathered between his forearms and her body.

The things he had watched this woman do and live through made this breakdown even more monumental in his mind.

Over time the heat from his hands and body suffused her and the goosebumps disappeared. A little while after that she was able to catch her breath. After that the tears stopped. By then he was up against her headboard and she was tucked into his side, her sheet bunch between them uncomfortably, but oh-so-necessarily.

“I’ll never have her life.”

He thought that sounded like a damn good thing based on what little he knew already. And he told her so.

“It is,” she agreed. “And it’s not. Someone loved her.”

He tried not to stiffen against her. If she needed to talk about her personal feelings, he needed to get someone more qualified in to help her with that. Like Daniel, maybe.

“She survived everything that happened to her. And, colonel, the _things_ that happened to her. I can’t… I don’t want to…”

“It’s okay.”

“But she survived. And he _worshiped_ her.” She shifted against him and he could feel the way it was her skin moving over the soft material of his grey sweater instead of the sheet. He didn’t look down. “When I sleep, I dream. When I’m awake it’s like a movie playing inside my mind. There’s so much horror.”

He needed to say the right thing here. It was important.

“There’s so much desire.”

Against his will his hand moved from her shoulder to her elbow, skimming down her soft skin. She tucked into him, her soft curves pressing against him in a way that made him think things he shouldn’t.

“I don’t know which is worse.”

“Carter.” He wanted to tell her she’d be loved like that. But not everybody got _worship_ in their lives. And he couldn’t bring himself to imbue her with platitudes. Besides, he didn’t really think this was about Sam’s love life. Hell, he didn’t even think it was about Jolinar’s. He thought it had a lot to do with how she was coping with the horror-show of memories that snake had left in her head and how maybe the passion was a break from it all.

This would be easier if she weren’t holed up in this house alone with bottles of whiskey. Maybe this would be easier for her if she’d found somebody worth a damn instead of wasting that time and energy on Hanson. Damn if anything he could wrap his hands around would make any of this better, though.

But sitting there, with his naked second in command in his arms, the sheet that had been protecting her modesty some sort of tangle between them, he had ideas he shouldn’t be having. And he damn sure wasn’t giving in to them. Because while she might think it would help – and there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that if he moved to seduce her, she’d succumb, considering the state she was in – it most certainly would do nothing more than complicate their lives unnecessarily.

“I don’t know what to do.”

He lay his cheek against her hair. “I know.”

“It’s got to go away, right? It’ll stop one day.”

He didn’t know. He could only assume, though, Carter’s big old brain would figure out how to keep the snake’s thoughts at bay and allow her to move on. “Yeah.”

“What do I do in the meantime?”

“Put on some clothes? Come to dinner?”

He hadn’t come over with the idea to drag her out of her house and into public, but he figured her gut could use some soaking up of the alcohol and her psyche could use a little of the outside world. And his sanity could use some clothing on her body.

She sighed, he could feel her breath against his throat.

“Come on. I’ll call Daniel. We’ll spring Teal’c from the base. We’ll get steak.”

He hoped it sounded enticing.

“Okay.” He barely saved his brain from the fantasy of a century when she started to pull away from him, but he fixed his eyes on her ceiling fan and felt her move to pull the sheet around her. She was completely unselfconscious despite their relationship and he wasn’t sure if he loved what that said about her or if it just spelled trouble for the future.

She climbed over him and he caught a flash of long, pale leg.

Trouble, for sure.

~*~

She ordered the steak. She let them talk in soothing tones. And when the night was over, she let Daniel hold her for a long time in his warm, solid, soothing embrace and she tried not to compare it to the colonel’s.

She had a quick flash of being held while crying and the feelings of comfort and worship that were elicited deep down inside. She attributed it to Jolinar the whole ride back to her house until the colonel bade her goodnight. “You’re gonna be okay, Carter.”

It was the way he said her name that made her understand that the feelings were hers and hers alone. They said good night and the entire time realization was swirling around inside her.

Oh god. What was she going to do?


End file.
